Implications of EFil+ on future Notary Accountability

[panges2]

E-Fil+ was developed in response to requests for a secure way to store large private data sets using the Fil+ funnel. Because of this privacy constraint of not being able to see data, Notaries in the E-Fil+ experiment are held to a higher standard when it comes to KYC/KYB.

I'm writing this post to emphasize the implications of the E-Fil+ experiment on the rest of the notary community. Based on the response of notaries in E-Fil+ could advise us to create accountability measures for all notaries in the future. I find the following points significant:

• We are implementing random assignment of notaries to each E-Fil+ application. For the first time, we are forcing notaries to conduct due diligence on applications that they may initially not want to sign. This creates a more fair system that lowers the chances of collusion, as It is harder to collude between client and notary if the notary can't select which applications to sign. Of course, there are cons to this method: It limits the ability of a notary, and tooling today allows any notary in the multisig to sign, so changing this would cost engineering time. Nonetheless, based on the reaction of notaries in E-Fil+, something similar could be implemented for all notaries in the Fil+ system in the future.

• We are implementing and keeping track of SLAs for notaries to comment on their decisions and for notaries to have a turnaround time of 72 hours. Keeping track of these metrics can tell us a lot about the performance of a notary. There are cons to this method: It could be a problem if we put too much weight on a certain SLA to judge the performance of a notary. Someone could game the system (eg. spamming a comment each time they need to fulfill the 72 turnaround requirement/ they need to sign something). But this problem could be fixed if we had many other metrics to judge a notary by. It is easy to game one scoring system, but it isn't easy to game many simultaneously. Based on the response of the notaries in E-Fil+, we could recalibrate these SLAs and hopefully establish similar SLA tracking on the rest of the notaries

• With the new SLA v1 change, it is the first time we are penalizing notaries by removing them from the E-Fil+ program if they miss SLAs 3 times. This is the first time we are penalizing a notary. Ultimately, if we want to hold notaries accountable, reputational penalties are not enough; a "red line" needs to be drawn. In the future, this penalty could be in the form of notary/datacap removal. Of course, where the "red line" should be drawn is very debatable and a topic on its own. The E-Fil+ experiment only helps us get closer to an answer for this.

Overall, not only is E-Fil+ an improvement to the overall Fil+ ecosystem, but it is also a great testing ground for notary accountability in the future. I'm excited to see how this goes!

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